Heard It in an Ad · Story 6
British cigar adverts on television
How Bach's "Air on the G String" sold cigars
Whenever things went wrong in a long-running British advert, someone lit a cigar to jazz-played Bach.
Everything has gone wrong. The hero, resigned, lights a cigar, and an unhurried Bach begins to play. For years that was the formula of a famous British advert.
Where you heard it
The British cigar brand Hamlet used this music in its television adverts for many years, in a jazz version of Bach's Air played by the trio of the French pianist Jacques Loussier. The television adverts came to an end when all tobacco advertising on British television was banned.
The real story
The piece is the Air, the second movement of Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. Bach never called it "Air on the G String". The name comes from an 1871 arrangement for violin and piano by the violinist August Wilhelmj, who changed the key so that the melody could be played on the violin's lowest string, the G string, alone.
Tell a friend
Bach never called it "Air on the G String"; a violinist gave it that name more than a century later.
Johann Sebastian Bach1685–1750Read the story of Bach →